Tag: hope

Remember you will not always win. Some days, the most resourceful individual will taste defeat. But there is, in this case, always tomorrow – after you have done your best to achieve success today.Maxwell Maltz

Defeat is something that can come to many different people and look very differently when it arrives. It’s sometimes absolute, sometimes partial, and sometimes shared and sometimes individualized. Regardless of how it comes to you, it most likely represents a sinking feeling in most people that causes you to stare deeply and question what to do next, what perhaps you should have done, and how to handle moving forward.

Perhaps you’re 10 years into a career you feel is a failure to pursue what you really wanted to do, which can represent it’s own kind of defeat. Perhaps you lost out on a job opportunity, or promotion, and were defeated by the competition which you may or may not ever stare in the face.

Defeat though, short of one that results in a loss of life, means you’ll have a tomorrow to wake up to and experience. It’s not for someone to act like it isn’t there (deflect / deny), or blame someone else (projection), or sulk about your lot in life (victim mentality). Instead, accept that yes you did in fact taste defeat today and it’s a horrible taste that no one enjoys in the moment.

Yet, it’s the ultimate lesson you can carry forward, and present you a learning opportunity much more significant than most any other lesson in life can teach you. Don’t become bitter and jaded, but instead, understand that defeat is part of what makes you human and is something you can embrace and carry forward, or chose to stay on that battle field and suffer the real defeat – that of your ambition, sense of self, perhaps your very spirit.

It’s entirely possible you may have one defeat after the next, until you’re defeating yourself and becoming the biggest attacking force you have to cope with. That defeat goes to the core of who you are, and it’s only you that can convince yourself that you’re less than you are and have no chance for victory.

The true defeat then, is you vs yourself, and letting in the lesser defeats to define who you are as an individual. You are a miracle in nature, just being alive and functioning with a set of lungs and a heart. You exist in a time where measles is being eradicated, racism is being addressed at every level of society, and the world isn’t run by a handful of bratty kings keeping everyone in a state of subjugation. There is so much wrong in the world, and you’ll run into defeat from any number of places – but hope must be the stronger force in your life.

Hope is what keeps you moving forward, and is the thing that picks you up and dusts you off. Hope is the champion that comes to fight any force beating you down, from the worst defeats that happen quickly to the long drawn out defeats against your self-esteem or self-worth.

You build hope in good times, where you take in what’s around you and appreciate, as a snap shot, what good things exist in your life. Those snap shots are what can sustain you past the worst things in life, and it’s a battle you’ll fight against yourself to see if those snapshots can build up the hope against despair and resignation.

Because life won’t always be a defeat, everything has ups and downs. If you feel in a constant state of defeat, then consider where hope could potentially enter in and reach out to someone to help you get some perspective.

Embrace hope, and remember you have the most complicated machine in existence working for you 24/7 (your brain), and a working set of functions to support that machine with whatever direction is prompted.

Embrace hope, even when you don’t want to – when it’s more painful to be hopeful then sulk and live in hurt.

Embrace hope, because you’re in a rut and you need to get the car moving forward again. No matter who you are, and how you were defeated, embrace hope and know that for even the greatest falls – there’s an opportunity to get back up, only if you’re hopeful enough to want to get up in the first place.